


hands not fit for holding (but I’ll hold you all the same)

by Anonymous



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Tattoo Parlor, Amnesia, F/M, Implied Sexual Content, Memory Loss, Romance, TILoAL AU, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-19 11:29:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29873991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Echo doesn’t remember Bellamy because he was cursed to be forgotten, but for a brief pocket in time, they will fall for each other despite it all.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Echo
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9
Collections: TROPED: Madness 2.0





	hands not fit for holding (but I’ll hold you all the same)

**Author's Note:**

> It’s the TROPED MADNESS 2.0 Qualifying Round!!! 
> 
> **Theme: Romance  
>  Trope 1: Amnesia AU  
> Trope 2: tattoos  
> Character Focus: Echo **
> 
> fic title inspired by Florence + The Machine’s song Hiding. Opening visual/scene directly inspired by the source of inspiration for this whole fic, _The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue_. Read it! It’s GORGEOUS! I know nothing about everything mentioned in this fic, so please just appreciate the *vibes*!!

_A boy is running down the hill toward a peninsula._

_The air is thick and salty. He can hear the crash of waves on the shores below drowning out the sounds from the city behind him. The sun dips towards the horizon and the boy knows he must beat its descent. His tunic rips on the thorns of the cliff roses, but he keeps running._

_His shadow stretches out ahead—too long, its edges already blurring—and small green leaves tumble from the crown in his hair, littering the ground like stars. A constellation left in his wake, almost like the one across the bridge of his nose._

_But the young man doesn’t slow, doesn’t look back; he doesn’t want to see the lifelessness he left there, waiting. Frozen like a statue. Solid as a tomb._

_Instead, he just runs..._

_. . ._

The edges of the dream begin to darken, everything blurring around the boy as he runs, the grass on the hills pass by quickly and the sound of the waves turn static. The woman dreaming could feel herself waking up, leaving the boy behind, and forgetting everything. It felt like time being unwound, heavy, and waning. 

When Echo opened her eyes, the room was warm, yet fuzzy. It took a moment longer for her eyes to adjust to her surroundings. She was in her bed in the small apartment she was renting up north. The morning traffic honked and screeched down below under the second-floor window. She could feel the soft cotton sheets covering her body, and only the sheets, wrapping her up in warmth. But it was winter, and she knew it was way too warm for her to be alone. 

She could sense there was another body in the bed beside her, but its face was still out of focus to her in the hazy waking state. Slowly and then all at once, she could make out their features. Freckles cluttered every inch of their face, thick brown curls fell right above the thickest eyelashes she had ever seen, and they had brown skin that could rival any of the tans she had worked hard for by the end of the hottest summers down by the water as a teen. 

She was drawn back to the freckles, and the prominent dots connecting perfectly over the bridge of their nose, like a constellation. There were seven. She felt a pull to reach up and touch them, but her mysterious bed partner was waking up, too. 

She could feel legs stretching out past hers and a hand brushing against her bare abdomen. She slid back giving them space and then to her surprise their deep voice grumbled a _good morning_. 

The man opened his eyes tentatively, Echo watched as he winced, not from the daylight streaming in through the open curtains, but from waking up in a stranger’s bed. 

“Uh, good morning…,” Echo trailed off hoping that he remembered more about what happened last night than she did. His face was blank but his eyes were searching hers. The dark brown irises were almost black, like obsidian, and widened slightly. 

“Be—Beck. My name’s Beckham. It’s okay if you don’t remember me,” he said quickly and rolled away from her, reaching down to the ground and pawing after his discarded clothes. He had been taking up over half of the bed and Echo tried not to stare too intently at his bronzed backside that had slipped out from under the covers, revealing two dimples at the base of his spine. 

“Echo,” she swallowed and then rushed to say, “I’m sorry...I don’t usually do this kind of thing. Not that kind of girl.”

“And I’m not that kind of guy,” Beck assured her, lifted his hips under the sheets to slide back into his boxers, and gave her a tight smile. She couldn’t help but smile back at him a little. 

“I’ll get out of your hair, but do you mind if I grab a drink before I head out?” He left her there to ponder and she watched him move into the kitchen, slipping on jeans and a navy sweatshirt as he went. She missed what words were written on the front of his sweatshirt, hoping to sort out more clues as to who he was. 

She felt dizzy trying to put their puzzle pieces together. _How did they meet? What all did she have to drink last night? When did they end up back here?_ _What all did they do?_ But she didn’t have any answers. Her mind was blank. Dark. 

She expected him to go to the fridge and grab a bottle of water, but Beck went straight for the small French press hidden in a lower cabinet and set it down gently on a sliver of empty counter space. He pulled out a tin yellow can from overhead, set water to boil, and placed a spoon next to her sugar bowl. Echo didn’t even know she owned coffee, wasn’t one to make it at home, preferred the dozen or so cafés on her way to work, but yet this man seemed to know his way around her kitchen better than she did. 

She laughed, she couldn’t help it. Beck had been staring at her kitchen table and looked back toward the bedroom, but didn’t say anything. She waved him away and got up to get herself dressed. 

Her apartment was small—like tiny-small—no more than a broom closet tucked away on a shelf in the middle of the City That Never Sleeps. You could see from the bathroom into the bedroom to the kitchen to the living room and back with sweeping views of the city from the windows throughout. There wasn’t a place for one to go unseen. Or forgotten.

As the apartment filled up with the smell of fresh coffee and cool bright sunlight, Echo felt her mind clearing, and she was determined to remember how she met Beck. She strode into the kitchen with determination, and clothes on now, but before she could ask the questions plaguing her mind, he was asking her some of his own. 

“You’re an artist?” 

“I dabble,” she shrugged, stopping in her tracks. Echo was clearly an artist. There were all kinds of mediums in literally every corner and surface of her home. Sketches on the kitchen table, miniature sculptures lined up against a wall, and dioramas everywhere you looked. 

“What are you working on?” 

Beck had poured his coffee into a speckled mug and went over to the kitchen table. The ceramic and design of it looked familiar, but Echo didn’t remember making any kitchenware recently. She glanced over at her pieces on the ground. There were vases in various shapes and sizes, and even colors, and a large porcelain heart. 

“Have you heard of Burning Man?” 

“It’s like a big hippy thing in the desert?” 

“No, it’s a festival that brings together the community for art and self-expression...and...yeah, a big hippy thing out West, I guess.” 

“I can’ts remember the last time I was on the West Coast, darlings,” Beck drawled, dragging out his ‘s’es’ oddly. He had somewhat of an accent, almost drowned out under his perfect English, but she had caught on to it for a moment. 

“I went last summer. The theme was about mirrors and masks, consumption and communion. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and so I started making those.” She pointed to the dioramas. 

The miniature models were for an installation she was planning to show at her job. The concepts hadn’t quite come all together yet, but she was working hard on it. 

Beck slid his hands over some of her sketches on the table, moving them into different arrangements. The drawing of an anatomically correct heart could be seen under the sketch of a cage, making the heart appear trapped and suspended in midair. 

“Are you an artist?” she asked him. He clearly had an eye for it. But he tensed up, and it was his turn to let out a laugh, he huffed out through his nose like the question was physically painful to him. Or ridiculous. 

“In a way...I’m more into the art of storytelling than the art itself, you know? Shaping the narrative of the creative future and all,” he said cryptically, and Echo hummed like she knew what he meant. They were standing close to one another now, side by side looking down at all her plans. 

Another drawing caught her eye, and then another. There were glass shards and broken mirrors penciled in or smudged with black ink. She could imagine colors filling in the spaces. She felt her heart rate pick up at the thought of it. She touched all of the ones he had grazed, slotting them into place permanently. 

“Hey, what do you think about—” 

“I should get out of here,” he interrupted her and then downed the rest of his coffee. His fingers tapped on the ceramic and he shifted from one foot to the other. Twice. 

“Oh,” she said disappointedly. It seemed like he wanted to stay and look over the work more...to spend more time with her, maybe, but something was pulling at him to go. 

Beck took his empty mug to the sink and washed it out, placing it and the other things he had used to dry on a towel. He turned back to look at Echo and she could see the front of his sweatshirt now. It was for a soccer team at a University down south. It looked vintage, with the white letters worn and the fabric around it faded.

She wanted to ask him about it and a dozen more things, but she got distracted by the sight of him full-on before her. They were about the same height, but he was way broader and bulkier than her thin frame. And there was something timeless about his appearance, the way his curls were effortlessly styled, even though he should have had a messy bedhead like she knew she did, and the way the features under his freckles were sharp, but he still looked kind. 

“You’re beautiful,” she blurted out. It made him blush and duck his head, so Echo reached up to his chin and tilted his face back up to hers. She moved closer to his lips, but he pulled away, taking a step back and looking everywhere but at her face. 

“Wait! You could stay!” She hoped she could convince him and reached for his hand as he backed up to the door to leave. “I don’t even know you.” 

“Exactly.” There was a sadness in his voice, a finality that was heavier than saying goodbye to a stranger you just met ought to be. 

“Meet me later! At the Azgeda Tattoo Parlor. It’s got this thing, and yeah...it’s where I work...um, off 8th Ave.” It sounded a little desperate to her ears, but she wanted to _know_ him. 

“Okay.”

“Okay? You won’t forget?” Her hope blossomed. 

“Never.” Beck gave her one more look, the laugh line on his left pulling up higher than the right into a sort of sad smirk, and then he twisted the door handle open. He bowed a short goodbye at her and was out the door, gone from her sight. As soon as the latch clicked, Echo’s memories from the last few hours dissolved like sand through an hourglass. The man who called himself Beckham slipped completely from her mind. 

She couldn’t remember what she had been doing since waking up. The kitchen was clean with no sign of dishes. The rest of the apartment was in its typical array of chaos from her work. The etches on trace paper hiding the things she was trying to say, the dioramas showing the layout of something in her studio space, and the porcelain waiting for her to remember the meaning of it all. 

She sat down at her table looking over the papers and got lost in what she found. 

. . . 

It was hours later when Echo rose from her seat, back stiff and fingers pinched, in need of air but feeling more confident in the future installation she was going to create. The clock over her stove read three in the afternoon, she cursed under her breath and rushed back into her room to get ready for work. 

She was surprised to find her bed so messy, with blankets strung out on the floor, pillows piled up precariously, and bits of her clothes here and there. 

“What the hell happened in here?” Echo chuckled and shook her head. She was usually a decent sleeper, and not the hot mess that was reflected before her. But she left it as it was and headed into the bathroom. 

She turned the shower on and let the water fall down like rain, icy cold from the old pipes, and waited until steam filled the small stall. She stepped in, closed her eyes, tilting her head up to let the soothing, steady stream wash away the layers of grim and any lasting imprints on her skin. 

She stepped out when the water was turning frosty again, wrapped a towel around her body, and wiped the mirror with her free hand. The steam still clung around the lightbulbs above her making everything misty. Water dripped down from her hair to her chest and she swiped at it while looking in the mirror. Something appeared to have been smudged on her shoulder, perhaps leftover drawing ink from her fingertips or soap residue, but as she leaned toward the mirror she saw it was still there. 

She looked down at her body and there was a small oval bruise on her shoulder the size of her thumb or a pair of lips. She gasped and dropped her towel checking over the rest of her body until she found something even odder than a hickey she had no memory of receiving. 

There was a tattoo on her collarbone. The lower edge of the hickey led to a small cluster of black dots that lined up neatly along her clavicle. She counted seven distinct specks among a dusting of ink that stood out in contrast to her beige skin. 

Echo was a tattoo artist by trade, but this wasn’t her handiwork. She had many tattoos on her body, but she didn’t remember who had tattooed a constellation on her or when it had happened, but it felt important to her. She ran her thumb over the design and the abrasion in contemplation. 

She didn’t dwell on it for very much longer, needing to finish getting ready for work, but her eyes kept catching on the area. The tattoo was healed, probably months old or longer, but the hickey was fresh. It started to hurt the more she pressed on it and turned a deeper shade of indigo. 

She went on to dry her hair, it fell at her shoulders covering the bruise but not the tattoo, and she curled it letting the lighter highlights frame her face. She shimmed into dark wash skinny jeans and a black lace-trimmed silk camisole to show off the tattoo under a warm leather jacket lined with sheepskin. Then she slipped into boots and was out the door stepping into the bitter cold. 

Down on the street, a light layer of snow was sticking to the sidewalks and she threw her hand up for a cab, not feeling brave enough to walk the few blocks to 8th. It was part of why she loved this city so much. The mobility and the weather were a mix of home and familiarity to her, yet the sheer size of it kept her always discovering something—or _someone_ —new. 

The car pulled up to the tattoo shop just as the City that Never Sleeps was settling into that lull between day and night. In the middle of commuters going home and partiers going out, the sun was descending and reflecting off the skyscrapers and snow-covered ground to create a blanket of cool pinks and purples over the city suspending it in time.

Echo had worked at Azgeda Tattoo Parlor since she moved to the city. It was owned by a burly man named Roan who was as surly as a teddy bear. He looked like a rock ‘n roll sea captain, more comfortable with his hands than his words, and claimed to have learned to tattoo with a bamboo needle from a Buddhist monk in Thailand. Echo was loyal and forever indebted to him for taking her on as an apprentice. 

And the Parlor was Roan’s baby, a brainchild of his brought to life by a local architect. It was an open concept with individual booths like a barbershop, with vintage barber chairs for the clients, single large light bulbs hung from the vaulted ceiling, and chalkboard paint covered the walls for the artists and patrons to display their designs and leave their thoughts. 

Echo felt like she was coming home when she stepped through the doors, like most of the people who entered Azgeda sensed. The wooden floors and black aesthetic were cool and comforting. There was also a full-out bar stocked with liquid courage and bad-decision juice. Gone were the days of arriving inebriated to get a tattoo—now it was a one-stop-shop!

It was already crowded with people that evening, lively and energetic from the music and the atmosphere. Echo flipped on her neon sign and equipment as she passed her booth, but kept moving, heading straight to the bar. It was full, too, but some of the regulars recognized her and made room. She sat down beside a man wearing glasses with a head full of curls, but she didn’t pay him any mind, too busy trying to get the bartender’s attention. 

“Hey, this is your work, right?” Echo called to Roan, leaning over the bar closer to his face, and pulled her hair out of the way. 

“Oy, don’t let the missus see that!” Roan swatted her hand away from her hair to hide her shoulder. He clutched his other hand to his chest and the cross hanging down like he was scandalized by what was on her skin. 

“No, the tattoo, you fool!” she said remembering how close the constellation and hickey were to one another. She pulled her hair back again and leaned further over the bar. 

“Oh, yeah. That’s with a 7FM2. What is it? Stars?”

“I think so. I can’t remember when we did it.” Roan shrugged and went back to pouring drinks, not bothered by the mystery of it like she was. It wasn’t the first time Echo had woken up to strange ink on her body put there by him. It was just a first for her to not have noticed it for such a long time. 

She sat down in defeat and glanced around the Parlor. Most of the booths were full. Luna had her hands full with a bachelorette brigade and her girlfriend, Raven, had a military-looking dude who was crying into his friend’s shoulder over a calf piece. There wasn’t anyone waiting and her first appointment of the night wasn’t for another half hour. 

“It looks like the Pleiades,” the curly-haired man beside her spoke up. He pushed his glasses upon his face and ran a finger down the beer that was sweating in front of him. “The constellation of the Seven Sisters?”

“Don’t think I’m familiar with it.” Echo rested her elbow on the bar and turned toward him. 

“Galileo was the first to view it through a telescope, but I can tell you about the Greek’s version of how it got there. The hunter, Orion, fell in lust with seven mortal sisters and selfishly pursued them all over the face of the Earth to claim them for himself. In pity for their plight, Zeus changed them into a cluster of stars, which he set in the heavens out of harm's way.” 

Echo nodded along to his story and when he paused she waited for him to say more. She still didn’t understand why she had them tattooed on herself. 

“You can see six of the stars with the naked eye now, but the seventh was said to have abandoned her sisters to return to her true beloved. I’m Bell—Bellam—Beau, by the way. Sorry, tongue-tied a little there,” he stammered and blushed, the blood heating up under his brown cheeks turning them rouge. 

“Nice...because of my beauty or whatever? Was that you going for a pickup line there?” she teased him and reached out to place a hand on his arm. The bicep under the sleeve of his button-up was firm and it was her turn to blush. She cleared her throat and leaned back on her stool. 

“Are you getting a tattoo tonight?” She looked him over. Round tortoiseshell glasses sat over the end of his nose and his face was covered in freckles. He was dressed business casual, but the scruff on his jaw and the loose curls on his head suggested something more unorthodox. Not the usual type, but Azgeda Tattoo Parlor was hardly usal. There was a timelessness to his appearance that demanded attention, but he could also easily go unnoticed. He could blend in anywhere with the slightest tip of his head and slouch in his posture. Echo had certainly missed him at first and she still wasn’t receiving the full effect of him. 

“Nope. No tattoos for me.” 

“What are you doing here then?”

“The Lager,” he said and held up his beer. It was a Greek beer that Roan imported from a brewery in Athens. “And the ambiance of being in a place where everyone is pretending to be one thing or the other.” 

Echo quirked an eyebrow up at his last statement in question. 

“The fake bravado.” He pointed to the soldier with the flag on his calf joking loudly with Raven, recovered from his freakout. 

“The rebellious.” He pointed to the bachelorette party and the loud bridesmaid who had been coaxed into getting a tattoo on her lower back. 

He had a great read on people.

“What would you say about me?” 

“If I was trying to pick you up I would tell you that you are making me so absolutely tongue-tied that I’ve forgotten myself, yet need only your face to guide me up to the heavens tonight.” 

She turned away to hide her blush and when she looked back, for a fraction of a second, she swore she saw on the bridge of his nose a constellation of freckles like the one he had described earlier that mirrored her tattoo. Beau’s face paled, but then the room darkened, she smiled at him, and he relaxed. 

She told Roan to grab her two more Alphas and the three chatted together for a few moments. The beer had a faint grain taste but was fairly bland to her. She didn’t see what Beau saw in it, but she nursed it until Roan walked outside for a smoke break. When he came back over to them she handed him the beer and signaled for her usual. 

“Who’s your friend, E?” 

“I just introduced you to him, Roan. Before you went outside.”

“Yeah, no. Don’t remember. Roan.” He stuck out his hand and Beau shook it. Again. Echo found it hard to believe one could forget just meeting someone, but then Azgeda was busy tonight and there were lots of faces. 

About that time, her first client had arrived. She looked at Beau and nodded toward her booth, “You’re welcome to watch me. Maybe I can convince you to get one.” 

“I think I could convince you first,” he joked back and pointed to her collarbone. She had to agree oddly and they laughed all the way to her booth. 

It was strange how comfortable Echo had been with this man. They had literally just met, but she felt this gravity around him. Parts of him seemed to be shrouded in mystery with an air of darkness clinging to them. Yet, there was something familiar to him, too. A déjà vu fluttering in the back of her mind. She traced the constellation on her chest absentmindedly as Beau told her another Greek myth and she winced at the bruise above it. 

Suddenly, she had a flash of the man with his dark curls and freckles smiling down at her as she squeezed his hand. His eyes were sad, but tragically beautiful to her. She told Roan to copy the stars straight from the man’s nose. Seven perfect marks, pieces left behind and up for grabs. 

She blinked and glanced over at him, her hands were busy setting up the inks while her client was enthralled with the story he was telling, but she tried to find the freckles over the bridge of his nose. She couldn’t see them clearly, but she could see _him_. With his broad shoulders and tanned skin. She wanted to run her fingers through his curls and feel the scruff along his jawline. 

There was no doubt how the night would end. Echo felt like she was in a trance as she tattooed one client after the next, hardly aware of what she was doing, but very aware of Beau. He sipped his Greek beer and watched her. He asked her about her designs and her art. She managed to pull some information from him, too. Like how he was visiting the city, that he worked for a museum overseas, and he thought she was pretty. 

At the end of her shift, once the neon lights of the tattoo parlor had shut off, she felt brave enough to walk through the bitter cold back to her apartment, with the warmth of his hand in hers.

She led him up the stairs and they shedded their clothes as quickly as they could once they stepped inside her home. They got tangled up in each other for hours until they were both satisfied and then they laid there on the floor. He twisted a lock of her hair around his finger intently and she listened to his heartbeat. 

“Don’t forget me?”

His question echoed around the room in the darkness that weighed heavily on them. She could feel the pressure of it and the drum of his heartbeat under her fingertips. There was a quick extra thump, and then she felt that familiar sense pulling at her that she just couldn’t place, but she laughed and reached up to brush her finger over the stars on his nose. Who was she to know that her reply was a lie every time? 

“I won’t.”

**Author's Note:**

> Check out all the TROPED Madness fics in the collection and don’t forget to vote to help decide who moves on in the competition! More info on the Challenge can be found on [tumblr](https://troped-fanfic-challenge.tumblr.com/)!


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